Re: Memory usage - Evoultion and Mozilla

From: Michael Pokraka (junkmail_at_quirky.me.uk)
Date: 04/13/04 

Date: Tue, 13 Apr 2004 00:41:57 +0100

Harry Fine wrote:
> system guard, or with the ps command, I seem to have multiple instances of
> java, Mozilla and Evolution running. There are 4 Mozillas processes at
> about 50000 bytes each, and 4 Evolutions with 51,000 each.

Multiple threads sharing the same piece of memory end up having the same
memory listed again.

> I have 528 megs of ram in the machine. Using the free command, shows only
> 6788 free, and 508084 used. Why are these applications hogging so much
> memory? Same as other tools show.

Ahem, you're not looking at all the numbers.... apart from cache, free even
gives you an output line that excluded buffers and cache:
free -m
             total used free shared buffers cached
Mem: 502 484 18 0 38 258
-/+ buffers/cache: 186 315
Swap: 2055 168 1887

In this case I've used 506MB, but 258 of that is cache and some buffer
memory. So, by the adjusted numbers (second line), I've only got 186MB in
use, and 168 MB of swap. (That's leftover from earlier in my case).

Linux is very efficient that it will always try to make use of everything
that's available to it. If more memory is needed it simply ditches some
cache....

Cheers
Mike

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